Having (just) recovered from my shock at the result of the presidential election I was intending to call this post 'Whither America' but accurate prognostication is obviously not my strong point! Thus, I have confined my opinion to the immediate American future which commentators tell us might lead to a suicide drive over the so-called 'fiscal cliff'. If this happens, the doomsters tell us, the resulting crash will reverberate round our poor, old, long-suffering globe. Or perhaps not, according to that shrewd observer, Irwin M. Steltzer, in The Weekly Standard. According to him, whether or not Obama gets what he wants from the leading House Republican, John Boehner, he will still get what he wants! If Boehner and the Republicans refuse to agree a deal on January 1st and the car goes over the cliff leading to hefty tax rises for everyone then Obama will simply offer an immediate Bill exempting evryone on less than $250k and dare the Republicans to oppose it. Thus he will get what he wants by way of tax increases. As to the immediate cuts in defence spending, that will be mitigated by the rundown of the war in Afghanistan and anyway, Obama and the Dems will not be too unhappy see cuts in the defence budget. In any event, they intend to spend huge amounts on 'infrastructure' projects which they believe will invigorate the economy and help pick up the slack, so they are obviously tending to believe in the bungee jump theory! The other factor coming in aid of the President is one I referred to recently and that is the shale oil/gas revolution which is providing 'America Inc.' with the cheapest energy costs in the world. That alone will strengthen the elasticity in the bungee!
Meanwhile, Jeffrey L. Scribner in The American Thinker reminds us that the rattled Republicans still hold one strong card and that is their ability to vote against any increase in the debt ceiling. So even if Obama gets his tax increases he will be hogtied by his inability to borrow money and his socialist programme for his last term will be still-born. In my opinion, Obama and his apparatchiks are determined, in Brown & Balls' style, to ram through even bigger entitlements which they hope will win the Democrats the next election but if they lose it will leave the Republicans (like our Tories) with the shitty end of the stick.
The real test in this confrontation is not of Obama's nerve but that of the Republican party. As 'The Kraut' points out in The WaPo with his usual bluntness:
Obama has never once publicly suggested a structural cut in entitlements. On the contrary, he created an entirely new entitlement — Obamacare — that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will increase spending by $1.7 trillion over 11 years.
What’s he thinking? Doesn’t Obama see looming ahead the real economic cliff — a European-like collapse under the burden of unsustainable debt? Perhaps, but he wants to complete his avowedly transformational social-democratic agenda first and let his successors — likely Republican — act as tax collectors on the middle class (where the real money is) and takers of subsidies from the mouths of babes.
On the subject of forecasting the future, I was amused by this entry in today's report from those cynical fellows at KnightWatch:
Today the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence posted and published a new document entitled Global Trends 2030. Attempts to download and read the document proved futile much of the day. However, many news commentators were more successful. Already that document has been cited as important for dozens of reasons.
The document is an examination of various futures 18 years in the future, 2030 having been selected for no apparent reason. There is an odd trait of intelligence analysts that makes them unable to predict great and imminent harm to US interests in the next month or two, but makes them confident about forecasts for the next 20 years.
Oh goodie, so it's not just me then!
